


Learning to Walk

by scherryzade



Series: Learning to Walk [1]
Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Lorne being awesome..., Sketching, Team Dynamics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-10
Updated: 2009-12-10
Packaged: 2017-10-04 08:02:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,490
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27813
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scherryzade/pseuds/scherryzade
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Evan had never actually learnt to draw. He had just known, learning to walk with a crayon clutched in his hand.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Learning to Walk

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted for the sga_flashfic 'A picture's worth 1000 words' Challenge on [18th June, 2009.](http://community.livejournal.com/sga_flashfic/868421.html)

"Can't you just photograph it?" Evan said, after a third hour ticked past.

Parrish didn't seem to notice his tone, and shook his head earnestly. "It's not the same. You need to balance detail with clarity." He flicked a quick smile at Lorne, who kept his expression even. "Botanists have been doing this for hundreds of years, and nobody's ever come up with a better method."

"You've got samples. Can't you do this back in the city?"

"Who knows how long it takes to get to this stage? It might only flower once every ten years."

"Is that likely?"

"Who knows? I've never seen anything like it."

"Maybe it's not a plant at all."

Parrish chuckled.

Suppressing a sigh, Lorne scanned the horizon. There was no threat on this deserted planet. He nodded to the two Marines, who startled out of their bored reverie and hastened to patrol their perimeter. Lorne turned back to the botanist. Parrish had started a fresh sheet, wandering closer to his new species. Lorne felt his own fingers twitch as he watched Parrish start to draw, with painstaking detail, the inside of the plant's flower.

"May I?"

"Hm?" Parrish looked back at him quizzically. Lorne felt foolish, his hand hovering over a sketchbook Parrish had discarded, but Parrish beamed at him. "Sure."

Certain that he was blushing, he took up the sketchbook and picked out a soft pencil. Turning to a fresh sheet, he looked out at the view again.

His first attempt was atrocious. Years of military training left his fingers, used to the shape and heft of a gun, twisting uselessly around the pencil. He tore up several sheets in frustration, each attempt worse than the last. He glared at the pencil, throwing it down to flex his hand. This used to be easy, he thought.

Cursing softly, he picked up the pencil, and spent several sheets just getting used to the feel of it. He'd never actually learnt to draw, he reasoned, had just known, learning to walk with a crayon clutched in his hand. It was easy. Line, circle, spiral. Shape and shade.

The lines of the landscape started to flow on the paper. Not spectacular - he was halfway through before he realised the composition was completely off. He could see his mother's sympathetic gaze and hear her unsentimental criticism. Is that really what you see, Evan? But a few weeks - ha - a few months of practice, he thought, and he might get the knack of it again.

He looked up to see Parrish watching him. "Ready to go, Major?"

~

He drew whenever he could find the time, which meant he ended up with sketchbooks full of people eating in the mess - unflattering portraits of scientists chewing their food. It was easier to sketch, scratching out little moments on the page, than to sit down and actually draw someone modelling for him.

Marines were a non-starter. They could stand still, but the poses were a choice of 'attention' or 'at ease', neither of which exactly inspired him.

Sheppard was worse. For all his apparent ease, he couldn't stay in the same position for more than a minute at a time. Evan took to drawing him surreptitiously, in the margins of briefing notes, because he couldn't not draw Sheppard. He could never quite do justice to Sheppard's hair.

The civilians were willing enough, but those who didn't wilfully misinterpret what he meant by 'pose' and 'draw' tended to take their cue from McKay, whose idea of standing still was to stay in the same room. Lorne asked Dr Weir once, and she graciously agreed. Evan spent the entire time thinking he'd have been better spending the afternoon on Heightmeyer's couch, the way she looked straight through him.

Ronon and Teyla were a joy to draw. Not simply for their beauty (he was surprised that he remembered how to think of Ronon as beautiful without embarrassment. His mother, he thought with only a little irony, would be so proud), but for the simple fact that they could remain still.

Eventually he realised he was coddling himself. It was easy to draw Teyla's calm beauty, or capture the pure shapes of Ronon sprawling across furniture that was too small for him. If he wanted to capture the essence of who they were, he had to draw them in motion.

He took to staying in the gym after his training sessions instead of taking off to nurse his bruises. He struggled to capture the sense of movement; Ronon's ferocious power and Teyla's unyielding focus seemed flattened on the page. On the other hand, drawing Marines falling on their asses became second nature to him.

~

He told his mother with no little embarrassment, sending her sketches that wouldn't be censored, little moments of life 'on base'. She responded by sending his old paintbox, the tubes of paint carefully replaced. Acrylics, because he had wanted to learn oils and she had tried very hard not to laugh. Not unless he was serious, she told him, and he already wanted to fly. Renaissance man, she called him, painting with one hand, inventing flying machines with the other. It went to his head, until he started using the acrylics, and realised that, no, he wasn't a genius.

He couldn't send her paintings, because the only thing he painted was the city.

And then he stopped.

When he was sixteen, they had moved house. Nothing drastic, simply moving to a smaller house after his sister left for college. But his old paintings had been boxed up, along with his paints, and somehow never unpacked. He still drew, but even that seemed to slip away from him as he concentrated on tidying up his grades. Drawing became a skill, more about visual acuity and penmanship than the pleasure it brought him.

At eighteen, twenty, he didn't care. The paintings were still there, but they were unmoving, and he was flying.

For all he knew, his easel was still standing out on the pier, facing Atlantis' central tower. More likely, it was lost when Atlantis fled from the Asurans. It would have floated into space, untethered, flying. He did not have time to care.

His mother prodded him, praising his efforts. He was eighteen again. He explained that the job - even before she replied, he could see her reaction to that, the quirk of her mouth - the job left him with no time. He expected her to be sarcastic, because she knew, now, he could make the time. Instead, she asked him what he was flying. He lied about that too.

~

Parrish yelped, and Evan span round to see flames engulf the plant he'd been examining.

Already running, Evan called out to Thomson and Diaz. "Get water!" The thicket was perilously close to the local village and its crops - if it spread, the little stone houses might survive, but the harvest - the reason Lorne was here - would be destroyed.

He couldn't see Parrish, and circled the fire to find him. Right, he thought, go downwind from the sudden unexplained bush fire. But Parrish was there, unharmed, staring at the flames.

"Parrish! Get back!" Evan started to pull him away from the fire.

"No, it's okay, look." David had that glint in his eye. Lorne pulled him back, then turned to look at the fire.

As quickly as they had started, the flames were dying down, the plants burnt beyond saving, but the fire contained.

"Fantastic!" Before Evan could stop him, Parrish had dived back towards the plants. He prodded one of the blackened seed pods, pulled back with a wince to blow on his fingers, then prodded it again. The seedpod shattered, and Parrish grinned. "You see?"

"Doc..."

"The seedpod needs heat to open. When it's ready to disperse, the leaves are dry enough that the slightest spark will set them off, and they burn so fast that the fire doesn't spread."

"So it just spontaneously combusts?" Parrish suddenly looked guilty, and the local who'd accompanied him shifted slightly. Lorne realised she was holding a firelighter like those used by the Athosians. "You set it on fire?"

"They would have burnt it anyway, if it hadn't gone up naturally by the next new moon."

The woman, Mawen, nodded agreement. "Some years there's lightning, but often we have to set it alight ourselves." Lorne really hoped there wasn't some sacred ritual involved. Mawen shrugged as Parrish broke another seedpod. "The children make sure the seeds are scattered."

Thomson and Diaz were approaching, slowing to a walk as they saw the fire had passed. "Sir?" Thomson gestured to the pail of water he carried, managing to imply both the great weight of the water and the speed with which it had been conveyed.

Evan sighed. "Set it down. We're going to need it for the doc." Parrish was already half covered with soot, his fingers black, a stripe down the side of his nose.

Before it burnt, the thicket had been a mass of leaves. These had burnt away completely, leaving only the seedpods, listing dangerously on slender stalks that started to snap under their weight. The seedpods dropped, bursting on the ground and sending seeds and soot in all directions. As Parrish scooped up seeds for his collection, Lorne bent absently to pick up a piece of stalk that had fallen near him.

The stalk left his fingers as black as the soot from the seedpods that covered Parrish. But it had been burnt through evenly, he realised, leaving the stalk almost silky smooth. Absently, he ran the stalk across his palm, where it left a thick, even line.

Frowning, he pulled a notebook from one of his pockets.

~

The trouble with Sheppard, he decided, was that he looked like a pen-and-ink subject, but wasn't. McKay was pen and ink - Evan started to use McKay as a test of how quickly he could capture someone's character. In one particularly interminable meeting, he ended up with a flickbook of Rodney in mid-flow, hands dancing over the page. He ran it surreptitiously for Sheppard beneath the table, and Woolsey glared at them as they sniggered through some poor anthropologist's report.

Ronon suited pen, as well, or the strong line of the soft black graphite that his mother favoured. Evan realised this when he was censoring Marines' letters with black marker. The thick up-tick of the marker mirrored the sharp line of Ronon's eyebrows, raised in quiet amusement at his teammates' bickering.

On M3C-581, he found a trader selling ochre and raw sienna, and what was near as dammit Conte crayons. He picked up the striking red- and golden-browns, and immediately thought of Teyla. He could spend hours drawing her as she nursed Torren, the city's own Madonna and Child. In the end, he spent hours drawing Torren, the baby in the crook of his arm and his sketchpad at a precarious angle, when Teyla was offworld and even Kanaan needed sleep.

Sheppard shifted uncomfortably. "Sir," said Lorne, a warning note in his voice, and Sheppard sat back again.

"C'mon, we've been here hours."

"Minutes, sir. About twenty, by my watch." Sheppard slouched fractionally lower in the chair. No, he wasn't pen and ink, except maybe in battle, where even Lorne hesitated to start sketching. Sheppard was charcoal - dark and soft, in sweeping lines that spoke of movement only momentarily stilled. Evan drew the delicate curve of Sheppard's mouth. Sensuous, his mother would say, and he would roll his eyes, because then she would ask why she'd never met his CO.

~

He woke with a nagging sensation pulling at his gut. The whirs and beeps of the infirmary around him told him the feeling wasn't just apprehension. Instinct had him thumbing the morphine drip he knew would be there, and he drifted off before he had time to worry.

Soft voices woke him. Opening his eyes reluctantly, he saw his team sitting round a table in the far corner of the infirmary. They were playing cards, Thomson frowning with concentration at his hand, Parrish distracted by his datapad and letting his hand drop, and Diaz leaning back with a calm expression, pretending not to look at Parrish's cards. New scars had joined old on Thomson's face, and a bruise was swelling under Diaz's eye.

After a moment, Thomson said "Do you have any sevens?"

"Go Fish," said Diaz, and Thomson swore.

Evan laughed, breaking off with a hiss as the pain swept back. When he opened his eyes, they were crowding at the foot of his bed. Thomson and Diaz saluted.

"That bad, huh?"

"Just good to see you awake, sir," said Thomson

"What happened?"

"Got shot, sir," said Diaz, deadpan.

"Gut shot," added Parrish. "Very messy." His deadpan was less convincing than Diaz's.

"Broke a leg, too."

Evan hadn't even noticed. The medics were good like that. Strong drugs. "How..."

"They shot you, and then threw you off a cliff." Diaz grinned suddenly. His sense of humour was a little unique, sometimes.

"So we blew up their-" Thomson stopped as Dr Keller bustled up, shooing them away.

"Major Lorne needs to rest, guys. Go back to your game."

"Yeah, what was that?" asked Evan.

"Nurse Rizk won't let us play poker in the infirmary," said Thomson. "We're going, ma'am." Lorne thought the Marines only called Keller 'ma'am' to see her blush. He raised an eyebrow at Thomson, who covered with another salute.

"Sheppard's taken you off active for a month," said David as they left. "Says you have paperwork to finish." He tapped the pile on the table by Evan's bedside. Evan leafed through the papers, ignoring Dr Keller's huff of annoyance. They were a little ragged, torn from the sketchpad he'd taken on the mission. Sketches of his team - Diaz and Thomson talking as they cleaned their weapons, Parrish engrossed in lichen; the three of them walking through the forest, just hours before they were attacked.

The painting he sent to his mother was simple, just the four of them walking up a hillside that could have been anywhere. He painted Parrish looking out of the frame, his face alight with excitement. Diaz was walking ahead of him, his arm flung out to stop David dashing ahead, and biting back on a smile. Thomson took up the rear, head in profile as he scanned their surroundings, the same old serious expression on his face, and the striking shape of his frequently broken nose clear.

He hesitated to add himself to the painting, never comfortable with self-portraits. Knowing his mother would call it false modesty (not in so many words - she would say that they seemed like nice young men, even Thomson, and leave Evan to explain himself), he painted himself a little down the slope from Diaz and Parrish, stopping to let Thomson overtake him but still watching the path ahead.

His mother sent him oils, and he tried, very hard, not to laugh.

~~~


End file.
